Caitlin Emma, who writes for politico.com, here reviews the threat to student privacy posed by online courses.
While students are taking these courses, the provider is gathering a treasure trove of information about each of them. This data may later be sold to marketers, who see students as customers.
There is a federal law that is supposed to protect student privacy, but in 2011-12, Secretary Arne Duncan oversaw a weakening of FERPA regulations, removing key protections.
Companies working together, like Pearson and Knewton, are gathering confidential student data whenever your child goes online.
Why should corporations advertise when they can use Big Data to identify their target audience? Race to the Top required states, if they wanted to be eligible for federal cash, to create a massive student data warehouse, to open more charters, and to adopt “college and career ready standards,” I.e. Common Core. Clever, no? A bonanza for certain corporations.
This is scary stuff.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I wonder where all that data will end up?
LikeLike
Oh,don’t worry.
The contractors got together with lawmakers and the contractors wrote this completely meaningless and unenforceable “pledge”:
http://studentprivacypledge.org/?page_id=45
The regulators are captured, Diane. They’re working for the contractors.
We don’t really have enforcement or regulation anymore. Instead we get “pledges”. voluntary compliance, lawmakers and regulators begging companies to pretty please use “best practices” and if they don’t…absolutely nothing will happen.
It’ll be like the banks and finance companies. They’ll pay for and receive a get out of jail free card. The best we can hope for is a civil suit by private lawyers when they violate this worthless “pledge” they’ve taken.
LikeLike
You are correct. This is big business, international, and corrupt. There is no security with the data. USDE is again aiding and abetting along with Gates. Been the case since 2005. And the data is not limited to students. It extends to every public school “teacher of record,” principal, and teacher education program. It includes health records of preschool children as well. There is no one wit the know how to blow the whistle on this scheme. Public schools are cooperating with this program of surveillance because the feds have funded it in tandem with the Gates Foundation, since 2005, and states that get any money from USDE have to comply, comply, comply. There are meaningless “pledges” as you point out. About as useful as the “privacy policy statement” that many people get once a year from credit card companies and banks.
LikeLike
I’m amazed this was promoted as “regulation”. It isn’t.
They saw there was political pushback from parents so they promised to “self regulate” thereby circumventing any real regulation.
“Pinky swear!” “We promise!” It’s insulting.
What happens if they violate this pledge? Nothing. It’s absolute BS. It’s not a matter of IF they violate, it’s WHEN they violate.
LikeLike
We have to get our students to be “career ready.” http://www.gocomics.com/tomthedancingbug/2014/11/28
LikeLike
YES. This is most scary.
LikeLike
Welcome to the Panopticon.
LikeLike
Bob You are correct. Here is a visual of the Total Information Management System and this is just a piece of plan. The original link of this image to USDE has vanished, but I used in a talk and found this version http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Student_information_system#mediaviewer/File:Student_Data_Management.gif
On a separate matter, Wonder if you know/worked with ideas/ research from Louise Rosenblatt or Alan C. Purvis on teaching literature?
LikeLike
My God, Laura. What a horror that graphic is! The people who created this represent a class of folks who are sick, sick sick.
For your viewing displeasure:
https://www.aclu.org/how-government-tracking-your-movements
Have a look at the video on cell phone tracking. In 1999, under the Clinton administration, the FCC issued regs requiring GPS tracking ability on cell phones, and there was never the slightest public discussion or debate about this Orwellian move. And, of course, Orwell’s two-way telescreens are now a reality made possible by Internet surveillance.
With regard to your other question, I have read, of course, Lousie Rosenblatt’s Literature as Exploration, and I think the transactional theory to have significant merits IF one keeps in mind a distinction between meaning as intention and meaning as significance, there being two very different sides to this “transaction,” neither of which should get short shrift. I recently sold to a bookstore my copy of Purvis’s Encyclopedia of English Studies and Language Arts, which I consulted off and on for years, but I have not followed his other professional work.
I struggle all the time with trying to figure out ways to get students to “take the author’s trip”:
To put themselves into the world of the work (which accords with an intentionalist view of hermeneutics),
To have an imaginative experience there (which accords with a phenomenological view of hermeneutics), and
Then to figure out what that experience means to them (which accords with a reader response/constructivist view, mediated, of course, by whatever interpretive communities the reader is part of).
I do not see these as contradictory or opposing positions because I think they are simply different activities, all part of the reading experience.
Perhaps the most important single moment in my undergraduate career was when I told a professor in class one day that I wasn’t a fan of Poe, who was just too gushy and over the top for my tastes, and the professor responded by saying, in a beautiful Southern voice with long, long vowels, “Well, you have to be willing to take Poe’s trip.” And then he literally laid himself down across the desk at the front of the room, closed his eyes, and recited “Anabelle Lee,” rapturously, from memory. We watched as he stepped through the wardrobe, fell down the rabbit hole, crossed through the portal or threshold into the world of that poem, and we watched as he experienced that world. We OVERHEARD his experience.
I don’t think it possible to overemphasize to students that this stuff, this literature, will mean nothing to them, will have no value to them, unless they are willing to GO THERE. But to GO THERE, they will have to have eyes to see and ears to hear, which means that the text does not mean whatever they want it to mean, is not simply whatever they might decide to construct. And those, those eyes and ears, they have to grow. They aren’t born with them.
LikeLike
Sorry about the long-winded reply. In short, yes, it is extraordinarily important for literature to be presented to kids as potential EXPERIENCES for them to have, and Rosenblatt is valuable and inspiring for her championing of this. When people attack reader response, they are typically attacking a straw man version of the approach that is not the one that Rosenblatt put forward so passionately eloquently. I very much like the transaction metaphor, as I like the metaphor of teaching as enabling those transactions and, by that means, the transmission of culture.
LikeLike
Another thought about this topic, Laura, if I may: Often, in ELA, a good idea devolves as it makes the rounds in textbooks and state and district education departments. A case in point, Rosenblatt’s reminders that we have to bear in mind, always, how kids are likely to respond to texts given their backgrounds, proclivities, etc., far too often has devolved in practice into injunctions to give students only materials that they can relate to because those materials are about familiar matters, are easily understood, deal with what the kids already know, etc. But the most important kind of learning is the UNLEARNING that happens when people encounter the odd, the unfamiliar, the strange. And the odd, the unfamiliar, the strange often is appealing precisely because it is so outside what kids already know.
In his book Genius, Harold Bloom write that the one thing that all the literary greats throughout history have had in common is that they were STRANGE. I think that an important insight.
Here’s how I put this in an essay I wrote called “The Vast Unseen and the Vast Unseeable”:
“All real learning is unlearning. You have to step through the wardrobe or fall down the rabbit hole into a place beyond your interpellations, beyond the collective fantasies that go by the name of common sense. Real learning requires a period of estrangement from the familiar. You return to find the ordinary transmuted—wondrous or horrific, but transmuted. You see it anew, as on the first day of creation, as though for the first time.”
LikeLike
Thanks for the extended reply. I am a long time advocate of informed eclecticism is teaching. I am also wary of enthusiasms that reduce great ideas to catch phrases, empty of meaning. Worked on a project with Purves in the 1970s. Rosenblatt was a consultant.
Find the strange in the familiar, make the familiar strange. Yes, but you add eloquence to this important concept
LikeLike
The present Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court while working as a private attorney actually weakened the FERPA privacy provisions during the Rehnquist Court in Gonzaga University vs. Doe making it impossible for aggrieved students to have a private right of action to sue in the event of the abuses you mention here. Secretary Arne Duncan DID NOT oversee a weakening of FERPA regulations, removing key protections. That was done long before he came into office right under the noses of all Americans. I actually challenged the ruling years later in a petition for certiorari to the U.S. Supreme Court and Chief Justice Roberts recused himself resulting in a 4-4 vote when it went to conference disqualifying it from being heard.
LikeLike
Schools need the flexibility to pursue routine uses of information without getting prior consent while allowing them to prevent those who may misuse or abuse student information from accessing it. The regulations announced today allow schools to do just that.
from “U.S. Education Department Announces New Measures to Safeguard Student Privacy.” December 1, 2011. Contact:
Press Office, (202) 401-1576, press@ed.gov
http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-education-department-announces-new-measures-safeguard-student-privacy
LikeLike
Schools need the flexibility to pursue routine uses of information without getting prior consent while allowing them to prevent those who may misuse or abuse student information from accessing it. The regulations announced today allow schools to do just that.
from “U.S. Education Department Announces New Measures to Safeguard Student Privacy.” December 1, 2011.
http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/us-education-department-announces-new-measures-safeguard-student-privacy
LikeLike
“The new regulations also allow for the disclosure of PII, without student or parent consent, where institutions have contracted with organizations to conduct studies or audits of the effectiveness of education programs.”
from “U.S. Department of Education Amends its FERPA Regulations to Allow for Certain Additional Student Disclosures.” National Law http://www.natlawreview.com/article/us-department-education-amends-its-ferpa-regulations-to-allow-certain-additional-student-dis
Review. posted on: Monday, January 2, 2012
LikeLike
“While it is impractical to use fMRI in the classroom (i.e., it is a prohibitively expensive, room-sized machine), Ed Dieterle and Ash Vasudeva of the Bill & Belinda Gates Foundation point out that researchers such Jon Gabrieli and Richard Davidson are beginning to use multiple methods to explore how specific brain activity is correlated with other cognitive and affective indicators that are practical to measure in school settings. . . .
“Examples of affective computing methods are growing. Mcquiggan, Lee, and Lester (2007) have used data mining techniques as well as physiological response data from a biofeedback apparatus that measures blood volume, pulse, and galvanic skin response to examine student frustration in an online learning environment, Crystal Island. Woolf, Burleson, Arroyo, Dragon, Cooper and Picard (2009) have been detecting affective indicators within an online tutoring system Wayang Outpost using four sensor systems, as illustrated in Exhibit 11. Sensors provide constant, parallel streams of data and are used with data mining techniques and self-report measures to examine frustration, motivation/flow, confidence, boredom, and fatigue. The MIT Media Lab Mood Meter (Hernandez, Hoque, & Picard, n.d.) is a device that can be used to detect emotion (smiles) among groups. The Mood Meter includes a camera and a laptop. The camera captures facial expressions, and software on the laptop extracts geometric properties on faces (like distance between corner lips and eyes) to provide a smile intensity score. While this type of tool may not be necessary in a small class of students, it could be useful for examining emotional responses in informal learning environments for large groups, like museums.”
[This is followed by a nifty series of pictures showing such devices for use in the classroom, with the labels “Facial Expression Camera,” Posture Analysis Seat,” “Pressure Mouse,” and “Wireless Skin Conductance Sensor.”]
from “Promoting Grit, Tenacity, and Perseverance: Critical Factors for Success in the 21st Century. U.S. Department of Education Office of Educational Technology. February, 2013.
This stuff is way beyond anything Orwell ever thought up. Your tax dollars (and big bucks from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) at work.
“He sees you when you’re sleeping. . .”
LikeLike
Recent article in the Journal of Aesthetic Education reports on adult response to museum exhibition, tracking by special glove with GPS and other devices for recording skin response, coordinated with dwell time in front of labels and all works of art on display and paths of movement from one work to another. Complemented with pre-entry survey, exit survey, and follow-up survey after two weeks. This study not done in the USA, but published here.
LikeLike
Diane Ravitch, you are a model not only in the U.S. but beyond. Your help in making information circulate, in clarifying issues and in creating a broad community is without parallel. Thank you.
I work on issues related to private sector involvement in education in developing countries, including bilateral and multilateral aid. We know in our field that, as goes the U.S., so goes–eventually–the rest of the world. These questions of ownership and privacy concerning learners’ data, most particularly when the creation, storing and use of the data are subsidized by public funds (including aid) will become quickly worrying in developing countries. Regulation and oversight are even more lax than they are in the U.S. and the U.K., for example. As the market becomes more difficult to navigate in the U.S., companies like Pearson are looking to export their business model with higher profits to poorer, and in some instances, more gullible, countries. I would be interested and grateful to hear from anyone else who shares some of these concerns and of course will respond with information on my side.
LikeLike
I believe I read this thought here some months ago, and I liked it…
Murphy’s Law of Data: If data CAN be misused or abused, then it WILL be.
LikeLike
Reblogged this on peakmemory and commented:
Online schools gather data on students
LikeLike